Spiral
by slagondrayer
Summary: Akitocentric oneshots. 'Like the Night of Cloudless Climes': "And all that's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes." Previous installment: 'Fata Morgana'.
1. autumn god

Disclaimer: Fruits Basket is not and has never been the property of R S Slagondrayer who has not and has never claimed any right to its copyright. All characters are copyright to their respective creators.

Synopsis: The difficulty in writing one's name is in asserting yourself when you're caught in god's entrancing grace.

Warnings: possibility out of characterness (OOC) and confusion, one-shot, villain-centricity and possible sympathy for a non-sympathetic character, writer inexperience, **spoilers**, 1st Fruits Basket fic, possible British spelling, deliberate abuse of grammar, possibility of disappointed expectations etc.

Special Warning: This fic changes name. The name it has at the beginning 'Autumn God' is not the name it has in the end. Note that this is a fact and must be taken as fact. (Don't scroll down just to see the name, you cheat! )

Read Responsibly.

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Autumn God

By R S Slagondrayer

Sheets of paper lay discarded around the low writing table, discarded as each one held a telling flaw.

It is a presence.

_It is a presence that remains with you, slowly filtering into everything you are and do until there is no space left for you. That is what being god is._

A brushstroke glid a black line against the til-then pristine paper, its simplicity belying the control that it had taken to make it.

_It is a presence that consumes you inside out, hollowing you out to make room for itself. That is what being god is. _

A second brushstroke cut across the first, shaking slightly as control slipped, and illness won out over determination.

_It is a presence that becomes you, making you a stranger to all those around you, leaving you with no one except yourself and it. That is what being god is. _

A third brushstroke streaked across the page, swiftly, angrily, as though compensating for the lapse in the previous one.

_It is a presence that you become, that leaves you only an undesired hatred and bitterness, leaving you wishing for death and the end of everything. That is what being god is. _

A fourth brushstroke danced its way along the white surface, bleeding black through it.

_It is a presence that erases you, leaving only a husk behind, a home for its parasitic self. That is what being god is. _

But I am not a god. Only a woman. I am the one that dies, not it, never it.

A brushstroke weakly crept its way on the page.

I am not a god. Only a woman who can only hope to write her name right one day.

_Aki..._

I am not ...

_Kami..._

Another sheet of paper slid off the table to join its companions. 'god' and 'girl' continued their fight on a new page

It Never Ends

'Aki-Kami'

Final Comments:

The synopsis was a little hard to make spoiler-free, and it is a little obscure-ish to my thinking. The lines in the brackets I added later to make it clearer what was going on. To get my real intention for this fic skip them. In the event that you blinked and missed it here's an ultra-explanatory synopsis: Akito is writing her name, which I believe means 'autumn son' and presume uses two kanji. the first Kanji, 'Aki' for 'autumn', she manages to write, but as she writes the second one, she writes the kanji not for 'to' for 'son' but for 'kami' for 'god' making her end up with 'Aki-Kami' which by the way is the name this fic gains at the end.i.e. believe that this fic's name has changed. It is no longer Autumn God as you read these notes but Aki-Kami. When you read it again, read the title. It's becomes Autumn God once again and goes through the whole process.' Why? Because it does. Why shouldn't it? Because it is in the same way she has to fight to remain in the picture...

Autumn God is a reference to the easy dominance of 'god' in Akito's body and 'Aki-Kami' is the result of her efforts to assert herself against it. 'god' is Autumn God, Akito can only manage to bring it down to 'Aki-Kami'. Her effort is such that it transforms the fic into a new title in the end.

Please don't contact me just to tell me 'Aki-Kami' doesn't translate into Autumn God. I know that. I'm not sure but Autumn God should be romanji'd as 'aki no kami'.

Reviews, comments and criticism (vague or constructive) will be appreciated. Lack of will have to be lived with with a great amount of discouragement. Thank you for reading.


	2. Spiral Juliet

Disclaimer: Fruits Basket is not and has never been the property of R S Slagondrayer who has not and has never claimed any right to its copyright. All characters are copyright to their respective creators.

Synopsis: Never a tale there was of more woe than that of Juliet and her Romeo.

Warnings: themes of suicide and death, references to mythology and Shakespeare, high possibility out of characterness (OOC), one-shot, villain-centricity and possible sympathy for a non-sympathetic character, writer inexperience, spoilers, 2nd Fruits Basket fic, possible British spelling, intentional grammatical errors, possibility of disappointed expectations etc.

Read Responsibly.

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Spiral Juliet

By R S Slagondrayer

She shivered in the room shaking slightly. Outside the rain pitter-pattered on the clay roof tiles. The room was getting dark in the premature nightfall brought by low-hanging rain clouds, and colder as the wet outside stole the warmth from all the sunny days that had come before, but she made no move to act upon either. Not switching on a light, nor turning on a heater. Akito made no move at all, except to stare straight through the falling rain, watching some invisible something only she could see; perhaps, fate weaving her tapestry, intertwining threads like a child at play.

The door slid open behind her and a long shadow fell across the floor from the figure standing in the doorway.

"Akito?"

She didn't react.

"Akito?"

This time more urgent.

He took a hesitant step forward, too familiar with her temperament to be sure it was the right thing to do. She heard the footstep as if it were the feet of a distant god setting foot in her lonely place. Her eyes remained trained on the horizon. Behind her he had come to a stop.

"Akito, Shigure has come to visit you." Her eyes remained trained on the horizon. Her ears...

"Akito...?"

There was uncertainty entering his voice. Then lightning flashed. He saw the splattered red against the window, and the small, thin ribbon of red that was slowly growing longer and longer as it stretched out from her kimono and it stunned him into action. He leapt to her side.

"Akito!"

A single touch set her off the balance she'd carefully managed to maintain, and the thick obi she'd worn failed to provide enough support to maintain the facade. Her head fell back, uncontrollably, laughably, like it was some comic sketch where the character's head rolled off its neck due its partner's careless clumsiness knocking it off, but neck and head were still whole on her, and it only fell back, exposing a vulnerable, too-pale, white neck to the world. Her eyes stared up glassily at the ceiling. It was funny, she could hear his heartbeat as loud as thunder, but his voice, and Hatori was practically screaming at her as he shook her, was like a distant hum. It was erratic, and quick, his heartbeat, that is, a staccato beat pounding adrenaline through him, she supposed. She couldn't be sure. She'd never been well enough to study well in high school. Her own was slowing to a languid tango lulling her into sleepy death. Her hands were still wrapped around the hilt of the dagger she'd plunged into it. There was no Romeo dead at her side, and she was no Juliet, but still, and the thought made her smile as the world dimmed from view, didn't it all make for a pretty, pretty, little tragedy. The last experience of her life was the return of all senses. The screaming, the feel of the hard floor beneath her, the discomfort of her position: twisted back on the obi, her legs still half kneeling beneath her, the ceiling illuminated by a flash of lightning, and her hands letting go of her happy dagger. The smell of Hatori, antiseptic and clean but tainted with his fear, the feel of the wool of his suit against her face, the taste of her own blood in her mouth... then blessed darkness.

It Ends

'Juliet'

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Final Comments:

The synopsis fits if you warp your mind around it a little (and yes, I mean 'warp' not 'wrap'). It's also paraphrased: the original line reads "For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo". I decided to leave it as it is beacause it just adds to and fits the off-centre slant of the whole fic.

As for the point: there is no great tragedy, no love affair broken off, the curse hasn't been broken, and 'god' hasn't been abandoned. Why has Akito stabbed herself in the heart, then? Because she can. And the family she leaves behind would probably ponder the question for ages if they even bothered at all without realising that painful, simple answer. Not spite, or revenge, but in the same spirit that some people go on expeditions. Not even curiosity. For this Akito, all life is a stage, and she's just cast herself as the tragic heroine... because she can, and I, personally, find that tragic in and of itself. This Akito is more AU than canon to my thinking though, but I felt like sharing.

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I'm thinking of putting the explanations up when I put up the next installments instead of what I am doing now, putting them at the end of each chapter. Which would you prefer? (It will help me know which way to go even if it isn't with majority vote).

Reviews, comments and criticism (vague or constructive) will be appreciated. Lack of will have to be lived with with a great amount of discouragement. Thank you for reading.


	3. Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

Disclaimer: Fruits Basket is not and has never been the property of R S Slagondrayer who has not and has never claimed any right to its copyright. All characters are copyright to their respective creators.

Synopsis: What does snow become when it melts? Does it even matter to the snow?

Warnings: possibility out of character ness (OOC) and confusion, one-shot, villain-centricity and possible sympathy for a non-sympathetic character, writer inexperience, **spoilers**, 1st Fruits Basket fic, possible British spelling, deliberate abuse of grammar, possibility of disappointed expectations etc.

Read Responsibly.

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**Now is the Winter of Our Discontent**

By

R S Slagondrayer

Akito raised her feet off the cool floor, toes fleeing the cold tiles for the soft warm comfort the bed. The light behind the door in front of her outlined it in a yellow glow, like something out of a nightmare not yet begun. She frowned a little at it and the sound of running water behind it. Behind it Shigure was taking a shower. Akito pulled her gaze from the doorway, before she gave into the impulse to fling it open and attack the person within with the sound of violins chirping violently in her head. They had gone past that these past ten years... past the odd, irrational urges that seemed to always slant to violence. Her gaze went to the moonlit night outside the window, as her fingers picked at the coverlet on the hotel bed.

She turned her head and a sparkle caught her eye. She stared at her hand where an engagement ring glittered, loose around her bony finger. He'd given her it seven years ago, and somehow in-between then and now they were always forgetting to get married. Most people assumed they already were: after all they had the same surname and how was anyone to guess that it was because they were given it by their respective parents, so they always got by. It was when they went home that the illusion of peace started to unravel. Luckily, most of the other Soumas were absorbed in their own lives and romances now. She didn't know how she'd have survived otherwise. She leaned back onto the bed, long plum locks spreading themselves out in a halo around her, and flung an arm over her eyes. She could feel a headache coming on just thinking of them. Shigure once hypothesised it was some kind of guilt manifesting itself whenever she thought of them, Akito feared it was something closer and more fundamental and familiar to them all. She vaguely heard the door open and Shigure coming in.

"Akito, it's freezing," he said, going over to the window to close the opening. Akito watched him go from underneath her arm and then turned her gaze back to staring at the ceiling. Shigure had turned to give her a cursory glare, which he quickly realised, was totally lost on her. He turned to the wardrobe and picked out the yukata he would wear to bed.

Everything's gone, she mouthed to the empty air. She missed his concerned look. It was true, everything was gone. Everything that was there before. She wondered if the others felt the way she felt: as if the first twenty-one years of her life were lent to someone else, and returned far too late for her to make anything of them. Shigure was there of course, but she felt he too had wasted his years waiting for her during that time. She turned her head, twisting at it at an awkward angle as she pulled up off the bed. Shigure mentioned something about it reminding him of some girl in a well, but she shrugged it off. She didn't know any Sadako neither did she care about a ring. With a creak of her long limbs she was up off the bed. Their eyes met, neither smiled. She didn't mind. Shigure's smiles were always bitter anyway... except for during those first three years. She moved past him and into the bathroom adjoining their room. A few moments later, the sound of a bath running could be heard. Shigure glared at the door and muttered something ugly, before turning to the bed. With a sigh, he got in.

Akito sat at the edge of the bath staring blankly as the water rose. Slowly she lifted one of her arms, and noted how pale she still was. Some strands of plum hair remained entwined against the paleness. She stared idly at her hand, turning it this way and that way, tracing the veins and wondering how on earth it could have been strong enough to throw someone out a window with. With a sigh she shook herself out of her reverie. It didn't matter anyway. She let the towel fall to the ground as she stepped into the ice-cold water. Outside, snowflakes drifted slowly to the ground. It reminded her of Yuki. She closed her eyes and leaned back to submerge herself totally in the water.

There is a girl and she's stuck in a well, and she claws her way out, and she's evil, evil, evil. Throw her back in the well, and let someone else let her loose again next time.

Her hair floats. Akito muses as she opens her eyes under the water. She sees it like purple sea weed in the ocean, floating all around her. It feels funny. She should get out of the bath. She stands and water cascades off her body. Mermaid. She remembers she once wished she was one. Mermaids turn to foam when they die. Mermaids have no souls. Mermaids... are too much like gods. She shivers and she's awake.

The room was cold; whatever warmth Shigure left after his shower was long gone. She grabbed a towel and rubbed herself down before wrapping it around her hair. She grabbed another and wrapped it around herself. She turned and stopped, staring at the mirror. With the towel around her hair, she could see a face she hadn't seen for a long time. Sharp angular eyes, a too wide mouth and a sharp nose stared back at her from the silvered glass. She stepped out of the bath and approached it.

She is older now, she reflects, noting the fine lines that are forming round her eyes and mouth. She hasn't really changed that much. She can still see herself. After all these years of hiding, she can still see herself. She touches her reflection. She misses it. She misses that face. Her face. The towel unravels from her head and falls to the ground.

She saw rather than felt her hand pick up the scissors.

Snip. Snip. Snip. Swish. Snip. Snip. Snip. Swish. She stared at the plum locks coiled like snakes at her bare feet and then up again. Her eyes stared back at her with narrow shrewdness. It had been a while since she'd last looked for herself. Even before "the end", she had been growing her hair, hiding behind longer and longer bangs. It was easy to let the rest of it grow, to feign the appearance of the Honda girl. Easier than she'd thought it would be considering she hated long hair. She placed the scissors back. Bending over, she picked up the discarded locks. Farewell, Rapunzel, she thought as she threw them into the bin. No more princes hoisting themselves to you. She picked up the towel and dried her now short hair. She opened the door and stepped out.

She'd always preferred her hair short anyway.

Shigure was laid out on the bed, already half asleep. She switched off the bathroom light and went over to the bed.

"Shigure?"

"Hmm?"

"Do you prefer my hair long or short?" she asked.

"Long," he murmured sleepily. "It makes you look like a princess."

She'd thought as much.

"I cut it." she said, getting in under the covers. Her body was cold from her bath and startled him into wakefulness.

As she drifts off, he is staring in fixed fascination at the exposed nape of her neck.

It Ends

'Shirahime'

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I've had this fic on the back burner for a while, leaving it to stew, until loritakitochan favourited it and reminded me I needed to get out of my hiatus and apathy.

The title is the first line of the Shakespeare play "Richard III" which was also borrowed by John Steinbeck for his book "The Winter of Our Discontent". When I read the full opening of Richard the III, I was struck at how if your replace Richard's deformation with Akito's godhood, the sentiments seem to echo and overlap. I haven't read the John Steinbeck book (and only found out about it when I looked up the quote online) but from what I've read, the fic also overlaps with its themes of someone doing something that doesn't bring them the satisfaction they expected. The full Shakespeare sentence reads in a happier tone as follows:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

As it is above, it fits in better with the ending of the manga; however, "glorious summer" seems too artificial a transformation when applied to Akito. That anachronism/contradiction inspired this fic.

The end title is from a manga collection of short stories. "Shirahime" and is the sort of Japanese equivalent of the European Snow Queen. Both have a presence that brings to mind "dying" a state that leans towards death, but which one can recover from into life: something that I felt captured the ambiguity of this more grown-up Akito. If Akito were a princess she'd be more Shirahime than Cinderella to my thinking.

I wanted to describe the relationship between an older Akito and Shigure, giving it the cutthroat edge of unacknowledged tensions lurking in the undercurrents and at the same time, I wanted to keep the sincerity of their relationship intact.

The tensions present arise from Akito having, under pressure, tried to erase the negative yet fundamental aspects of her character and present herself more as a transformed rather than a reformed character. Ten years later, she has become worn and jaded and her facade is fraying at the edges. She finds herself longing to be herself again and in a moment of subconscious action, chooses to reclaim the fundamental aspects of her nature that she's been trying to escape all these years. Shigure meanwhile has always idealised her and thus failed to realise that she's been suppressing a lot of her true character. There is a rift between them he becomes aware of only when it begins to reconcile due to her actions. The solution to Akito's winter of discontent is not to turn into Spring as she has tried (and just ending up as water) but to become a Snow Princess, retaining the chill that makes her her own person enough to allow her to allow other people in.


	4. Emotional Vodka

Disclaimer: Fruits Basket is not and has never been the property of R S Slagondrayer who has not and has never claimed any right to its copyright. All characters are copyright to their respective creators.

Synopsis: There are novel ways to drown your sorrow: Akito's is a cocktail.

Warnings: possibility out of character ness (OOC) and confusion, one-shot, villain-centricity and possible sympathy for a non-sympathetic character, writer inexperience, **spoilers**, possible British spelling, deliberate abuse of grammar, possibility of disappointed expectations etc.

Read Responsibly.

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**Emotional Vodka**

By

R S Slagondrayer

Sitting on the arm of a couch, swirling clear liquid around in her glass, Akito feels out of place but she doesn't say anything. They're finally back at the Souma residence after a three week vacation that turned into three years. Shigure dragged off to catch up with the other two of the Mabudachi Trio means that she has no company, and no buffer between her and her family and the ever-lingering past between them.

god is stifled away, suffocated in the dark closet at the back of her mind where all her skeletons come to rest waiting for their resurrection. Her old self is there too; in the end, she couldn't quite separate where one ended and the other began so she tossed them both into that dark corner of her mind, slammed the door shut and turned the key, all the while murmuring soothing, reassuring words of how they'd all be reunited one day, words she didn't mean. In their place, she has cultivated a new Akito. She was never beautiful in a traditional sense, her features slightly disproportionate in her narrowed face, but the new Akito has no need of tradition. Her longer hair softening the contours of her face, face made up in glossy baby pinks, and body draped in a bright, tangerine cocktail dress, under which she is wearing pink tights, she is hardly the Akito of past festivals. That god-boy-woman-child has been replaced by a trendy twenty-something who epitomises Paris-Milan-Tokyo chic, with a tinkling laugh and a casual relaxed wrist twirling her glass. She can feel the curious glances in her direction by her family members but ignores them in favour of the rhythmic hypnotic twirling of her glass and a stare through the liquid within into memories they can't remember.

It is midnight when Shigure joins her again; just in time to raise a toast with her and herald in the New Year with a kiss intended for her lips which she deftly manoeuvres to have land on her cheek. She laughs a silvery, tinkling laugh at his pouting expression and kisses his nose. He runs his hand through her longer hair, and smiles at her. She smiles back putting all her heart and effort into it. This is love, she reminds herself, and she pulls him in and whispers something flippant in his ear that makes him kiss her again. Her glass catches the light and for a moment she can see herself reflected in the curve of its cup. Midnight and she toasts god: not quite forgotten and silenced in the shadows of her mind.

Afterwards, she pulls Ritsu into a dance, kicking off her high heels for the honour of moving to the lively tune playing. She ignores his startled, uncertain glances and carousels with him for three whole songs, calling it quits just as people make up their minds to rescue him. Returning to the couch, she tosses back her waiting drink, savouring the citrus-y bit of lime at the back of her throat that resembles the sting of unshed tears just enough for her to pretend that the feeling is all flavour. Her stiff armed salute to little girl Akito, who never even dreamed of such freedom, leaves an emptied glass in her hand.

She meanders over to the bar, and leans over it, grabbing a bottle and pours herself another drink, her back to the (too) crowded room but furtively watching her family members from the corners of her eyes. It's the first time they've all been gathered together since the end of the curse. She isn't surprised. From her own experience, the ties of family were really as fragile as she'd feared them to be. Without god, she feels alienated from them; the over-sensitive bond gone, she's found nothing in its place.

Beneath the artificial ties of god and zodiac, they never made any real enough connections for there to be any sincere relationship in its absence. She observes pockets of friendship and love between them, and even family relations but those feelings exclude her and that feeling of family eludes her. They are as distant as the moon... She sips her drink and flashes a smile at Shigure when she catches his eye. Of course, she can't tell them that. Especially not him. He might be her last chance at getting back that feeling she only remembers when she thinks of her father. She thinks she might love him, that it might be the residue of what little there was that was really part of the old Akito, but she doesn't know since she's had to lock away everything to do with that person just in case, and she isn't sure if what it is is enough or even salvageable, but she's willing to try. She sets an empty glass casually onto the bar as she pulls away to drag Kureno into a dance. She doesn't even know it's him; she just needed to get away from all her thoughts.

"Are you happy, Akito?" She blinks and stares blurry-eyed at the person asking. She's back on the couch again, lying stretched out on her back with the lazy posture of a sunbathing cat, bare feet tapping to the music while the party goes on around her. She'd settled into a half-asleep state and even the intrusion of this person hasn't quite pulled her out of it. Her mind can't quite focus on the eerily familiar face sitting opposite her, which she muses, is like talking to her past self (selves?) and she wonders which one is asking: god or child. She shrugs carelessly, it doesn't matter either way, so she decides to answer anyway, swirling her glass again and taking a gulp of its contents.

"Happy? Yeah," she laughs. "I've never been happier," she lies, with a secret, alluring smile on her face. The truth is she doesn't know. She's not unhappy though. At least she knows that. And maybe it isn't a lie after all. She leans forward and kisses her visiting knight's cheek. "Thanks for asking." She throws her feet to the ground and, an elegant wave of her hand adds another empty glass to the side table. She focuses enough on her guest to grace him with a smile before she's gone in a swirl of tangerine and pink. Yuki watches her go, still stuck on the couch, his expression still locked in astonishment from the unexpected kiss. She slips into the bathroom and emerges a few moments later, more awake and boldly decides to join the little group Shigure has gathered around himself.

An hour later an Akito feels like salting her drink with her tears, and smiling 'til her face cracks, exposing her desperate wish for it to all go away. Something is unravelling, uncoiling anxiety in her stomach and god is too quiet against the door of his locked closet. The old Akito is staring at her from shadows: a pitiful creature with antagonistic, accusing eyes, mocking her and laughing at her failure to make things right again for all of them. The new Akito tells them both to stay in hell. A glass stem threatens to shatter in her white knuckled grip and she ignores the tears she isn't crying. Ayame's said thoughtless words that, in his usual manner, have left her staggering. She can't even remember what they were, only aware that they've hit and hit hard. She'd forgotten that, in her case, holding conversation with the chatterbox was like Irish dancing in a minefield - it was only a matter of time before he'd step on something and blow her up. Only her new poise means that it hasn't happened for all the world to see. There are no more dance partners (Hatori is a definite no - close proximity to the reminding set of eyes would unravel her right now). She leaves for a breath of fresh air. An empty glass lies abandoned on the bar counter. It is 2:00 am.

The chill night on the balcony is invigorating after the claustrophobic atmosphere of the room. She stands, leaning against the railing, her thoughts drifting to the past. The family she once built her existence on is now an unravelled puzzle she can't decipher. The pieces are there but she's lost the picture they were supposed to form. She doesn't know what they mean to her anymore or her to them, and quite frankly she can't bring herself to try and figure it out. She's picking up where she is, accepting the new nothingness between them and hoping that someday, there'll be something there to replace everything she lost when god dwelled and died in her. She wonders if her father wasn't lucky: dying before he could be emptied.

Since god was locked away, she's found herself thinking more of her father. Her connection to him is the only thing that emerged unscathed from the aftermath of the end of the curse. In fact, it has become stronger as if there hadn't been enough room to be both god and love and mourn him enough and she was only getting the chance now. He looms larger than life, the only person, perhaps, who could have understood how dizzying the headiness and vertigo of being god was. He is the first person she ever loved. Ayame's unremembered words have left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth, and thoughts of her father are only bringing tears to her eyes. She hates them both. The past too often haunts anything to do with either of them. She sighs even as the door behind her opens and light, careful footsteps echo on the wooden boards.

"Brrr, it's cold out here."

It is fitting, Akito thinks, resigning herself as she turns around to face the newcomer. Tonight could not have gone by without a meeting with the girl who changed everything. Tohru Honda is as beautiful and homely as ever, she notes dryly, taking in the long brown hair and large eyes. She still has the same deer in the headlights look she had as a high-schooler, and Akito's plunged into the memory of the first time she saw her. She doesn't let any of this show, of course. Her face remains a cool, vaguely interested mask as she watches the younger woman. "It is a bit cold out here," she agrees after a moment.

Tohru has been appraising her as well, and finally feels ready to say something. "You're looking well, Akito. It's great you're here. We weren't sure you and Shigure would come this year."

"It's good to spend time with family on occasions like this," Akito replies, parroting words she's not sure she's ever believed. "You look well too, Tohru." She always uses the girl's first name. It helps keep up the pretence that they're all living in some happily ever after. She even smiles at her: a warm friendly smile, if a little vague. Over Tohru's shoulder she can see Kyou watching her warily, trying to pretend he isn't at all worried about his wife? Fiancée? Girlfriend? Akito finds she can't remember what they are now, and she's too lazy at the moment to find out. Tohru's two friends are also there, lingering supportively. Akito wonders how much they know. The fact that they're trying not to be conspicuous in their suspicion of her tells her they know enough. She, on the other hand, decides to be charitable and not mention anything to Tohru that might alert the other girl that not all is well in their little Garden of Eden.

Tohru is looking up at her curiously, and Akito finds herself indifferent to the attention. She knows what the younger woman is looking for, and knows she won't find it: Akito has remade herself anew. She looks down through the railings, her longer hair falling forward and framing her face. The movement allows her to hide an amused smile. The old Akito and god are not a part of the new her. However they may lurk in their closet, however the memories flow might seem to bring them closer, the new Akito has them firmly imprisoned in her depths, and she will not set them free even in sentiment. Tohru can search all she wants. Akito is confident about that.

"You seem happy, Akito," Tohru says, smiling brightly, now done with her observation.

Akito returns her smile. "I am." It is easy to. The new Akito is an effortless lie, and in time, she'll have made even the tenants of the skeleton closet fade into obscurity. The new Akito knows that in time, she will supersede everything that's come before and she waits patiently. In time, the lie will become the truth. She's come so far even now: no one else can tell the difference. "What about you, Tohru?"

"I'm very happy," Tohru enthuses. She joins Akito in leaning on the balcony railing, encouraged by the total transformation she's seen.

"Good," Akito says. It might be the only thing she's really meant all night. The night air sends them into a shiver, and it's time to leave the balcony. Besides which, she can sense the apprehension growing inside the room. Kisa and Hiro have drifted closer to the doorway, and, next to Hatsuharu, Rin is glaring at her accusingly. She smiles again and quietly and cleverly convinces her companion back indoors, while she lingers to enjoy the night a little longer. She takes a sip of the drink she'd brought with her and toasts the new moon and her new self.

She slips back into the room as she senses the attention shift from her to Tohru who's about to make an announcement with Kyou squirming awkwardly at her side, and slides into one of the huge armchairs in the corner of the room. She can see the whole room from where she's sitting. Her hand has orphaned the now empty glass onto the side table, and she watches the proceedings through half-lidded eyelids. She looks too charming as she sits, with her head tilted coyly and that knowing, secretive smile on her face. The night is finally beginning to tell on her as she feels a drowsiness creep into her body. She's alert, however, as the room bursts into cheers, clapping and rounds of "Congratulations".

Shigure's by her side in a moment, thrusting a full glass into her hand, talking animatedly at how great it all is and wondering whether the kids will have orange hair like Kyou or Tohru's brown hair. Akito smiles, and laughs in all the right places, and quickly downs half the glass down, as this time she's the one being dragged onto the dance floor as the music starts up. She realises she still doesn't know whether it's an engagement or an impending birth they're celebrating. The glass is taken from her hand by an eager Shigure and handed over to a suddenly present Hatsuharu, and before she has time to say 'hi' or 'thanks' or even be suspicious of the young Souma's appraising stare, she's being twirled round by a teasing Shigure. She realises she doesn't really care much either.

Hatsuharu watches her for a moment and looks down at the glass in his hand. He sniffs it, and frowns and then takes a sip. He knows and hates that he's got that look on his face that just screams "stupid cow stare" because Kisa's approaching him, dragging Hiro along, asking questions with her eyes, but he really_ is_ confused.

"Haru? What's wrong?" Kisa asks, when she feels he isn't responding to her unspoken question.

"Humph," Hiro snorts. "Don't drink it if you can't handle it." He's irritated at being curious himself.

Haru shakes his head. "It's lime juice," he says, quietly, "Plain, ordinary lime juice."

It's Kisa's turn to look confused and even Hiro looks unsure. Haru makes his way over to all of Akito's discarded glasses, subjecting them to the same treatment as the first. A sniff, a lick and his confusion doesn't dispel. He turns to Hiro and Kisa, who've been following him and finds Kagura has joined them as well. He knows he looks stupid but this time it's justified.

"They're all lime juice," he says. "There isn't any alcohol in these glasses. She hasn't had any alcohol while she's been here tonight." He looks over to where Shigure's taking her through another spin and it just confirms his suspicions. "In fact, I'd say she's dead sober."

The three Soumas look at him in disbelief. They turn to watch the couple, and find no other explanation for the steadiness with which Akito remains on her feet, even as Shigure gets carried away with twirling her around.

Hiro is now openly frowning. "If she isn't drunk then why has she been acting so different?" It had seemed the logical reason for her mellow mood, and her friendliness, but with alcohol eliminated as the main suspect, the question just seems even stranger. The four are left with a confused silence.

"Well, people changed," Kisa hazards meekly. "Maybe she's really different."

"Yeah, maybe," Haru replies with a smile and just like that, the matter is dismissed. After all, sleeping dogs are best left lying.

The song has changed to a slow, romantic melody and Akito finds herself being lulled by the slow motion as she and Shigure navigate the dance floor. His heartbeat is a soothing tempo in her ear, and her eyelashes flutter shut. Shigure brushes her hair from her face as her breathing evens out and in a quick, smooth move, he's swept her off her feet. She nestles against him, her pop-y clothing jarring against his traditional kimono. Ayame is quickly at his side, handing him her shoes.

"She looks so peaceful when she sleeps," he comments. He feels bad about earlier. Although there have been times when it was deliberate, he really didn't mean to bring up the past or hurt her feelings this time, if only for the fact it is the first time he'd seen Shigure in three years and he didn't want anything to spoil the reunion. It's like dealing with Yuki all over again, except he has little inclination to actually reconcile with Akito. At this point, reconciliation with his brother and the head of house are mutually exclusive in his mind.

Shigure nods in agreement, understanding everything that goes unsaid, but leaving it at that, because he's not here to fight and it has been a long time and in the end, he can't really justify Akito. Everything she's done speaks for itself. He is easier to forgive because his deeds are less out in the open, though not necessarily less unkind. She really looks beautiful when she sleeps and he wonders if he's ever going to get over the fact that she's with him. Out of everyone she could have been with, she's with him. He thanks Ayame for the shoes and with a grin says his goodnights to everyone left behind.

Akito wakes just as he opens the door, eyes fluttering open sleepily. "Happy New Year, Shigure," she says slightly apologetically, cuddling into him.

"Happy New Year, Aki," he replies. He worries about her. She'll be alright in the end, though, he realises as this time she lets him kiss her on the lips. For her part, she thinks that this feeling she has for Shigure just might be love. She's still not sure, but she won't worry about it now. Over Shigure's shoulder, she catches sight of Hatori watching them and waves before turning into Shigure's shirt and going back to sleep. Hatori smiles a little at the two of them. It's not paradise, yet. He can read the signs well, but he knows when to count the little things. Shigure disappears with his princess down the corridor and the New Year goes on.

It Doesn't End

'Drowning Their Sorrows in Happiness'

-------------------

This was amazingly draining to write! Akito's semi-hysteria was dizzying to write from scene to scene and keeping up the presence of the party through it all was a challenge I hope I met.

The title 'Emotional Vodka' was finalised after the story was complete. I chose Vodka first because of it's reputation as a potent drink, adding 'Emotional' was decided by one of the lines in the Bjork song 'Joga', which I was listening to and has only recently left my playlist of the moment (I'm listening to Linkin' Park now). The title is supposed to convey the idea of strong emotions that are easy to use to mask others and harm you if abused.

The end title was written first before I remembered the line/title from the poem 'Not Waving But Drowning' by Stevie Smith. They both have a similar feeling of despair being misinterpreted as happiness. 'Drowning Their Sorrows in Happiness' however is also meant to show people who try overly hard to be happy in order to stop feeling sad.

'Emotional Vodka' is a sort-of prequel to 'Now is the Winter of Our Discontent', occurring just after Akito has established her new 'perfect' persona. Akito and Shigure have returned back home for the Chinese New Year's which the Soumas now celebrate with a more modern party. As a side note, she and Shigure have already discussed and agreed to get married; they just haven't done all the official things yet like the ring and telling the family.

My main aim was to describe Akito's ingrained destructive nature and the new self-image she's hiding it behind that fools people into thinking she's gotten over it, while in reality she's just found a new target: herself, and a new way of destroying herself. Shigure who knows Akito best is seemingly happily oblivious to this, but it's just his usual ability to ignore things as long as he gets what he wants. But what I really wanted to show was how beneath everything they're running from and everything they've gotten wrong they really mean what they feel to other and in spite of themselves, they've gotten that right.

'Emotional Vodka' is a my study of two people who hurt themselves the most by being misguided, dishonest and afraid, or sometimes unable, to truly express what's inside of them who hide all of this behind a façade of normality, and hidden beneath all of that, really love each other. It's a potent cocktail of emotions that has them buzzed and unable to think streak and yet could sweep them away.

When I gave this to my sister, she listened to 'Joga', 'Immature' and 'Unravel' (all Bjork's Homogenic album) while reading it, the last of which began playing just as she read the line "The song has changed to a slow, romantic dance…". I looked up the lyrics, and thought they quite fit this dysfunctional relationship.


	5. Fata Morgana

Disclaimer: Fruits Basket is not and has never been the property of R S Slagondrayer who has not and has never claimed any right to its copyright. All characters are copyright to their respective creators.

Synopsis: Stone by stone, amidst the mists of Avalon, he will raise Camelot once more.

Warnings: possibility out of characterness (OOC) and confusion, one-shot, villain-centricity and possible sympathy for a non-sympathetic character, writer inexperience, **spoilers**, possible British spelling, deliberate abuse of grammar, possibility of disappointed expectations etc. **Dust off your dictionaries. Re-reading may be necessary. **

Read Responsibly.

--------------------------------------------------------

**Fata Morgana**

By

R S Slagondrayer

_Avalon/The Wayfaring Stranger_

_When King Arthur died, his greatest enemy in life, his sister Morgana La Faye, bore him to her island, Avalon, there to rest in peaceful slumber beneath the watchful gaze of its four queens. _

_5.23 am _

From my window the morning is shrouded in a mid-blue haze as yet untainted by the orange hues of sunrise. I'm taking a moment from getting dressed to just sit here and look out across the still-sleeping world. These moments belong just to me, moments when I can remember I am alive. I have at least taken that part of your words to heart. I am alive, but I am also going to die: apparently that part wasn't entirely a result of the curse and so my life continues to wane, though now it dwindles rather than drains away like it did before. Between now and the end, I have decided to do something with my life and in doing that, my world has become this: moments of silence and contemplation sprinkled amongst the rhythms of the duty, debt and promises of a clan head. But now, in this unmarred not-yet dawn, a cup of tea wafts tendrils of steam into my softly lit room. As it cools in my hand, I trace a fingertip along its rim in an absent-minded caress, while servants move like ghostly shades in the half-shadows, setting about on their daily duties. I watch all this from my window for the moment before a jealous sun will raise its orange light on my world, and start stealing one more day from the few I have left. The door opens and a figure enters. Half-murmured greetings are exchanged between us and it is time for me to go to my own duties. I slip my arm into the other sleeve of my kimono and blow a cooling breath onto my tea. The horizon glows orange.

**Entry 1:  
****Hating the Sun**

* * *

The wool kimono that is slipped onto my shoulders is not quite entirely a mother hen gesture on Hitomi's part. This autumn is colder than usual, and outside the window, the wind whistles its promises to bite through meagre silk as cheerfully as a truant schoolboy. Its threats matter little to me. I have always dressed like this as far as I can remember, the extra layers needed to keep out the cold in the large, draughtier rooms of the main house, and guard my fragile health from even the mildest changes in temperature, and it seems to me that I seem to have spent my life immune to nature's whims, one half too feverish, too hot to feel cold, the other in chills, shivering with an unnatural cold no amount of layers could dispel. Lately, I am always cold.

I would disdain the uselessness of the kimono in such a case except as he helps me shrug into a thickness and weave of a material suited accordingly to the weather around my shoulders, the warmth of care, however brief and futile, within that slight gesture reminds me there are still some things that can reach through the extended winter of a frozen soul when, after you took away everyone I thought could possibly care, I had given up hope of feeling. I had expected to live my life without a modicum of relief from the coldness of solitude. I leave the tea cup on a side table, and venture outside.

**Entry 2:  
****lit. 'a thing to wear'**

* * *

I have a grand aunt who has taken to growing humongous peonies all over the complex: huge, horrible, putrid pink things the size of dinner plates that bob dementedly in even the smallest breeze. She considers them to be a reminder that beauty can be found even in the most awkward places and that hope survives even in the darkest of times. She has even planted them near the main house as a sort of platitude to me in my dying state. I pass them each time I visit my mother. At those times, on my way back, their false platitudes echo even hollower in the wake of her maternal spite. Today, their nodding heads and sweet, sickly scent have reminded me of you on the last day we saw each other. You had come to see me, reached out your hand to me, in friendship you said. Do you know that I was tempted? It seemed so easy, so inviting to just reach forward and take it. However, I hesitated and the moment was lost. Then I blinked and you had stolen the people I once held most sacred to me: my zodiac were gone, flown away on the serenity of your plebeian wings and I could not begin to regret after that. Ten years on, the emptiness of that loss is still a strain on my day-to-days and makes your overture of friendship echo even hollower than the wind-nods of grotesquely oversized peonies of a virulent pink hue.

**Entry 3:  
****The Peony Pavilion**

* * *

The devil peonies are not the only things stirred by the wind. Lanterns quiver along the eaves of the houses as the wind races past them; chimes clink and tinkle like dragon scales as the wind teases them coquettishly, and clan members shuffle by, shadows hugging the walls, hunched and huddled against themselves as the same mischievous wind tugs at their sleeves and hems to nip at their wrists and ankles. They nod and chatter greetings into the morning chill. There are no strangers amongst us. Mist steams from my breath as I greet them in turn, wisps of white with which the wind plays. Cold turning us into little steam trains, we chug-chug our way to our personal routines.

It's only a matter of time before I sneeze and soft cashmere is wound and tucked around my neck without a word. My distaste for scarves on cool mornings is immediately justified by the way my glasses steam up from my redirected breath. Too unfamiliar with scarves to adjust it, and too stubborn to ask Hitomi, I allow my vision to remain fogged. I resign myself to seeing the world in misted blurs and slow enough to allow my companion to overtake me enough to be my guiding bur. However, duty calls as a frazzled housekeeper comes running towards him, relief etched on her face at the sight of his. He's gone off after her before I can say anything. The scarf is nicely warm, though.

**Entry 4:  
****Eaves Leaves**

* * *

In a lull between passers-by, I find my mind drifting, as it has been wont to do recently, to everything that happened back then; the choices made and the consequences and to you…

Everything seems to somehow comeback to you, who you were then, and what it meant. You destroyed my world, and left me in the devastated ruins to find my way back to pillaged fields, and only now, have I come far enough to be able to look back and remember without fearing that everything will shatter once more.

As I walk, red leaves are orphaned from their mother trees, fluttering forlornly to earth all around me, cajoled by the wind's pied piper tune. Grey-pink-blue pigeon sky is an unwritten daybreak banner beneath which Souma streets come to life and I trudge onward through memory. I'm barely conscious of the crunch of dried, dead leaves beneath my feet as I gaze unseeingly at the changing hues of sky.

**Entry 5:  
****Pigeon Sky**

* * *

You were a girl who changes the world without trying because somehow, people would feel sorry for you and decide to change it for you. Everyone wanted to protect your smile, your happiness. Did you see that, I wonder? Do you even realise how far people would have gone just to try and keep you happy? Everyone, Shigure included, in spite their selfish motives also did their best to make sure you would be at least happy. I witnessed their defiance, carried out both secretly and openly, each time slipping further into despair. They loved you. They love you. There is and was nothing I could do.

Hitomi's presence startles me as he reaches and slides open the shoji door for me as I enter my offices. Breakfast awaits me on a low table. These thoughts of you and the past whirr through my mind as I quickly glance through the tasks and paperwork stacked on my main desk, before finally sitting to eat. The bread is ash in my mouth and, when I take a sip of it, the tea has grown cold.

**Entry 6:  
****Tea-Bitter Tea**

* * *

A replacement breakfast abandoned halfway to deal with yet another crack in this family, I face courtyard flagstones littered with shards of broken porcelain that were once vases. At the centre of the maelstrom a young Souma trembles like a stalk of corn in the wind. His usually impassive face is momentary alive with emotion: pain, hate, anger, desperation and rejection flit across his face like night time reflections of neon signs on a car windshield while his hands spasm jerkily at his sides.

"You know, you can't keep breaking everything that reminds you of what you don't have." I throw out casually as I step into the fallout zone, announcing my presence. His hands unclench and he turns to stare at a point just beyond my feet. The morning sun catches and glitters against the streaks of tears on his face, breaking the illusion of indifference. I continue nevertheless with my opening gambit. "In the end, you'll have nothing whole." His hands tighten into fists and an angry glare is snapped to my face._ You don't understand!_ The words scream in his eyes.

**Entry 7:  
****The Mirror Has Two Faces**

* * *

"Something's just can't be fixed no matter how much you wish they could," I continue, "and so you have got to make the best of the little that you do have - " my next words are not easily spoken. "- Because, sometimes, just sometimes, it can even feel like it's enough. . Nobody is worth losing that. _Nobody _is that deserving .And you shouldn't break things, because sometimes, when you have nothing, that little piece of wholeness is the only consolation you'll get and sometimes, just sometimes, a little piece of wholeness is the only consolation you want." His hands unclench again and he stares at me, defeat etched in the pain across his face.

I bend down, and one by one, I start picking up the pieces of broken porcelain, delicately placing them in my other hand, and thus begins the task of clearing his destruction. There's a moment's stillness before he too moves, turning the front of his hoodie into a makeshift basket, and joining me in silence, both of us ignoring as much as is humanly possible how our personal tragedies, poetic and blasé, stain this moment into a cliché: our hands moving down and up, picking up the pieces of a shattered life.

My breakfast is probably cold by now...

**Entry 8:  
****Still Life in Porcelain Shards**

* * *

Sometime later in the morning I have taken a break from my regular duties to file away the letters I received earlier. The act finds me torso-deep in the black lacquered box where I keep my few personal keepsakes and correspondences. I slip the letters in my hand into their appropriate place. There are other letters in there as well as photographs and small trinkets and mementos I've managed to magpie along the years, everything held in smaller boxes or bound with elastic bands or loosely piled. Of the letters, not all are letters that were sent to me. There are letters I've written to no one. Letters I've written to myself. Letters I've written to the living. Letters I've written to the dead. Letters I've written to the air; Letters I have not written.

The three letters I wrote Yuki sit in their envelopes, unopened, the way they were returned to me with some anonymous postmaster's scrawl - 'Return to Sender' - emblazoned across them. The letter I tried to write to Kyou remains half-unfinished across five sheets of drafts and a screwed up paper ball, abandoned as words failed me. There are letters from Kureno, a small pile of correspondence that came fewer and further apart until they stopped coming at all. There are letters from Hatori, more recent than most of the others that either have the air that they were scrawled off quickly between engagements, or feel as though they were pondered over for whole nights. Ayame's letters are notable by their absence. Shigure's pile is the largest. His letters filled with daggers of varying degrees of malice disguised as casual observations come most readily and steadily.

**Entry 9:  
****Alphabetical Soup**

* * *

Nostalgia has made me pensive. It is laughable how easily everything fell apart at your touch - like flowers from a stalk - 'he loves me', 'he loves me not'. We've all drifted so far apart. In the clan, the Zodiac have now gained a new moniker - Émigré Souma. After so many years, they are barely even heard of, let alone seen, in the family circles. The thought of how easily they discarded our bond is sometimes a serrated edge to my thoughts. Other times, I am just envious that they could.

It still tears at me, the bond that is, a crawling feeling under my skin that I claw at as my mind screams in rebellion against the wrongness of being alone. The dangling threads of our connection continue to reach out to something that is no longer there. The relationships I have fostered since have been enough to subdue the echo of the bond into a dull after-effect, but not completely banish it. I don't think anything ever will. It is absence that has haunted me longer than the substance of the bond.

My doctor's letter lies unopened on my desk, telling me things I already know. I sit down and finally write the rest of Kyou's letter.

**Entry 10:  
****To my cousin**

* * *

"How are you doing?" I ask, as I sit down, taking his hand in mine and measuring his pulse while I'm at it. He gives me a strong grin today.

"Ah, today's a good day. I had a good night's rest," he says. I nod, appreciatively. Sleep when you're dying feels like you're sleeping your last moments away. At the same time, the wakefulness can sometimes be an endurance test on its own. A good night's sleep makes on better for it.

"Has Iku been?"

"Not yet, and I hope he doesn't. I'm having such a nice day and he'll come and spoil it by bringing me all sort of pills and medicines now that I stand a chance of keeping them down," he said, making a face. I smile wryly. I can sympathise. That's not how anyone would like to spend their momentary reprieve, but Hatori was always insistent and he's Iku's only example in his new duty.

My old teacher's house is on the outskirts of the compound. He's old and his health is failing and I visit him almost daily. I know what it feels like to be dying... the loneliness when no one comes. On the days I cannot come I make sure that someone sends him my greetings. Today we spend time together relatively free of our worries for the future. I wish he wasn't dying, but the world turns anyway. Wishes and horses…

**Entry 11:  
****[If wishes were horses]**

* * *

10:47:33 am. Three things happen in this instant: one, I bring my second cup of tea for the day to my lips; two, I set down the papers in my left hand and glance at my accountants; and three, there is a knock on the door.

The tea is a recent habit I've developed, a bittersweet blend, doused with extraneous amounts of sugar in direct proportion to my expected stress, to soothe my perpetually frayed temper. It's served in a pretty cup: hand-painted, 5 Meiji. Other than that, it's nothing out of the ordinary. It is a cup of tea. The papers go together with accountants and the tax season. We're reviewing the Souma financial record. As clan head, I sign off on all the accounting books of each branch family and there's a whole stack beside my uncles that I am electing to ignore for the moment. It comes with the job. The knock at the door is a knock at the door. It ripples and disturbs the routine. It demands attention. It draws focus. It can be dealt with by someone else. It comes with living.

I set down the cup, it makes a slight chink as it lands on the saucer; flick my reading glasses back up on my nose and instruct Hitomi behind me to attend to whoever's at the door, I barely pay any attention to the rust-hue of his kimono going past me to the doorway while I pull my attention to focus on the task before of me. Making sure to avoid acknowledging the as yet unattended to stacks of files, I pick up a pen and start signing.

10:47:52 am: I forget about you for a while.

**Entry 12:  
****3 Things**

* * *

In a clan as intermarried as Souma, the past echoes without respite in ripples of resemblances glanced that make it impossible to forget. Here, Shigure's arrogant smirk is mirrored on a distant cousin's triumphant face; there, a little girl giggles and Momiji ghosts through me; other times a brash voice travels and Kagura seems only a few rooms away and now, one of the young clan members has paused to greet me on her way to morning piano practice; the cold, frigid hues of Hatori's irises stare out at me from someone else's face. There is no escape from the past in Souma and the taste of the memories lingers bittersweet in the spaces between my teeth. I would say I'm sorry, if only for there have been something said, but I have no one left to say it to and moments like these have become a fruitless exercise in exorcising the ghosts you unravelled and left me with... Her eyes meet mine briefly and I barely manage not to flinch.

**Entry 13:  
****Udju Azul Di Yonta**

_Lyonnesse/Ephemeral Existence_

_Lyonnesse. Childhood home of Queen Guinevere. Where she stood now only cliffs witness the ever-crashing sea. _

_Lyonesse fallen, tumbled into the relentless sea. _

Here, cocooned in layers of kimono, meditating on the past and all I lost in it, I allow myself to become a Buddha of wool and silk. Long ago days come back to my mind more often than ever before and stay longer and longer each time... longer than I'd like. The wind outside sings the syllables of your name into a sepia thread that strings together all the memories I had hoped I had forgotten into one long chant of hope, pain, dreams, loss and failure. In the end it all comes back to _that day_. I remember you in this very room, your mouth spilling forth words I could not understand; my instinct warning me of things I could not yet see. I remember you pleading to be allowed to know me.

My fingers trace the smooth lacquer of my desk following the twelve symbols engraved on the emblem in the centre, each stroke along their lines, a sutra beneath my touch:_ Mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, boar..._

...my hand falls still.

**Entry 14:  
****The Sound of One Hand Clapping**

* * *

Do you know, I wonder, that everything I offered them was real? My hate was real, my pain was real, my cruelty was real and it was more real than anything they'd ever given me because the love I once harboured for them, too, was real.

Everyone watched me fall, only going through the motions of trying to save me until I no longer needed saving. I was too far gone, and they became the ones who needed saving from the monster that I had become. Then they were there in earnest, throwing and gambling whatever they had to get away, to save themselves but before everything turned to the dry, autumn leaves that burned so easily in the warmth of your flame, before I hated them, I loved them... once. Truly. Madly. Deeply.

**Entry 15:  
****Arcadia's Graves**

* * *

An irate relative has his hand fisted in the front of my kimono and his faced shoved close to mine. Cornered, with a table digging into my back, resignation coasts through my blood, an easier emotion with which to veneer my anger, even as it becomes hard to ignore his words and the hot vehemence in each hate-drenched breath that licks against my skin.

"- an abandoned god, neither loved, nor hated nor feared - just useless.., - useless and" he hisses through clenched teeth. "... meaningless!"

A flash of red and all I can see are Hitomi's red-brown irises, shaky and wide with fear, all I feel through this numbness is his body shivering against mine. I have no idea what just happened, only that the irate relative is now lying on his back on the floor, _his eyes _wide with shock, and deep claw marks along the inside of the hand that had grabbed my kimono dripping more and more blood onto the floor and Hitomi is trembling, I realise, with the force of keeping me pinned against the wall, my feet just slightly lifted off the floor, and the emotion flickering in his eyes is uneasiness as he contemplates what would happen if he let me go. His eyes flicker to the corner of my mouth and he wipes suddenly steady fingers on the spot with a frown. In a passing glimpse, I see his fingers have come off red. To think the conversation had started out civil enough....

**Entry 16:  
****The Nature of the Rose**

* * *

Red-brown eyes lock with mine. I exhale slowly and go slack, turning to avoid the still-startled face of the frightened relative. Tetsuo, I recall dispassionately, an in-law. Outsiders are so troublesome. I lower my lashes and Hitomi lowers me back to the ground. The red is wiped off into a black handkerchief; denial shared between us.

"Get out." I say my voice a hoarse whisper. I stop myself from looking at the man, and seeing... I don't know what I'll see there but I can't deal with it right now. I tremble as I slide down against the wall, to land with a soft thud to the ground. Today has been a long day, and when I look at him, all I can think of is you and how you took them away, how you took them all away. I am not breaking. I am not breaking, because Hitomi is holding my wrist and pulling me to my feet and saying words that reassure me, and he is sending Tetsuo away with tersely spoken words that brook no argument, and Tetsuo is leaving because between him and me, Hitomi and I, I am not breaking. I am not, never have been and never will be weak enough to do that. Not even you... not even you can take that away from me. I do not break... I snap and it is the world that bleeds. Never me... it will never be me, and that is a vow. I raise my head and Tetsuo's scrambled to his feet. He stares at me one last time, a frown deep on his forehead. I am not weak, or breaking, or sorry... I am Akito and he shouldn't have forgotten that. You made him forget that. You made him forget, and he's here a few feet from me bleeding like I would never, never have made him when I was still god, and you know what? Right now, I hate you again.

**Entry 17:  
****Red Melange**

* * *

In the tradition of past clan heads, lunch is more like an informal holding of court. Uncles, aunts, cousins - everyone discusses what's on their mind in stage whispers meant for my ears, to which I pretend to listen or not, depending on my inclination.

"Have we heard from the Émigré Souma?" a tiny bow-legged uncle says loudly to his table neighbour. "What are their intentions regarding the jubilee celebrations? Are they going to attend?"

My chopsticks drag through my food listlessly as conservations swirl around me, most of them centred on the upcoming clan celebration. The rattle in my chest has bloomed into a scratchy feeling that intensifies whenever I lean over to meet the food on my chopsticks. Concentrating on the feeling and the irrational urge to aggravate it almost makes me miss some of the stage whispers that dart across the lunchtime table.

As for the question at hand, the answer was in one of this morning's letters. Like in years before, they have chosen to meet at your place. Silence hovers above the midday meal until it seems I have waited to long and those interested turn back to their meals in resignation.

"_Those _Souma," someone sniffs diffidently, "have no filial piety regarding this clan." I lean forward again.

**Entry 18:  
****Feast of Broken Glass**

* * *

I am seated, leaning out of the window like Hatori used to hate me doing, like I was the day you came to the main house. My eyes are on that street I saw you walking on, my mind equally far away, the day turning more languid with each passing second.

It's only a little bit of dust but I know even before it happens that I'm under threat. I am aware of the exact moment my body begins to crash. The rattle in my chest explodes, and my hand comes away from my mouth bloodstained. I let out a desperate gasp for air that only causes another explosion. As I slide coughing and choking from the window seat, I can hear the ringing in my ears getting louder. The world swims around me and I slide to the ground, struggling to regain that precarious control I've so quickly lost.

**Entry 19:  
****:: expiration::**

* * *

_I trailed my fingernails across the floorboards as I sat crouched before the bowing man. Hitomi was a still, solemn figure behind me, his eyes flat and unreadable, though I could sense the tension reverberating through his body. He did not know how much I knew and so wasn't going to risk saying anything in case he let slip something I hadn't known, but I had seen the results of my own handiwork and had learnt to read the trails of cruelty left behind. Someone was being cruel to this boy: I had known this the moment our eyes had met. From there, it was a simple process of elimination and eavesdropping and the trail led me to the source: his stepfather, the man upon whose cheek I now lay thin, slender fingers in a gentle caress. Pleasantries exchanged, it was time for the unpleasantness to ensue. My eyes fixed on him, a sly smile teasing the corners of my mouth upwards. The outcome of this interchange had already been sealed..._

**Entry 20:  
****A Recollection from the Abyss**

* * *

Hitomi is holding me now, an unintrusive support at my shoulder, just as my steadiness wavers. I choke on another cough and my hand fists into the fabric of his clothes. The texture of Hitomi's stepfather's hair fisted in my hand is one of my more puzzling memories. I cannot honestly say why it, along with the memory of the sound of his body against the floorboards as I dragged him out of the room to Hatori's tender care, has been imprinted with such vivid clarity on the surface of my mind, nor why the wetness of his blood on my hands just before I wiped it on him is immortalised in hues of lucid sensation upon my palms, but then I look back at the Hitomi-who-was-then and the Hitomi-who-is-now, and I find I don't really care.

My body quakes as an unnatural chill settles in. My skin has become clammy and a new railroad's been laid in the back of my head. I force myself to take deep even breaths even as the world dims for a second before Iku's panicked face comes in view, telling me _(screaming at me?) _to breath. I lean my head back against him, and marvel at the warmth that engulfs me. Was Hatori ever capable of being this warm? I wouldn't know. You would though, wouldn't you? Yes, you would... You said when snow melts it becomes Spring. You probably know how warm Hatori feels when he becomes spring. A bitter smile crackles on my face as I remember how you melted the snow in my family. I almost drowned in your so-called spring. Even today, I still have to swim through the deluge.

**Entry 21:  
****- Exercises in Anaerobic Living -**

* * *

If you stare at people's noses the right way they can't tell you're not looking them in the eye. Someone once told me that. Someone broken and damaged. They can't tell you're not looking them in the eye, and because you're not, they can't read your pain. It was a useful tool in the tango of avoided gazes Hatori and I engaged in towards the end every time we met. Between the ever stoic glances past, through but never at each other we stretched the ever-widening gulf of non-understanding between us even wider. I preferred it that way though, rather than having him pick at scabs that weren't quite healed. I've learnt the only things that hurt the way _this _(_all of this_) does are the things one would like to believe one once cared about, the things one still cares about. Hatori's excuse? I don't know. Perhaps he was trying to hide his indifference to my fate from both me and himself. Iku pulls the cold stethoscope from my chest, and he foregoes the scolding lecture, instead holding out his hand to me to help me up as he tells me I'll be fine. I shake my head with a wry smile as I close my eyes rest my head back against the window seat.

He's looking at my nose.

**Entry 22:  
****Duplicit****é **

* * *

One would think that, as the archetypical wicked queen, Ren's taste of scent would be suitably sickening and cloying, but the clean, fresh notes of her perfume wafting through the air actually help me keep my head clear. She's been watching me with her usual, attentive schadenfreude and Iku's downcast moue which cracks through the brittle mask of impassiveness that has always been more a sign of his helplessness than his disaffection kindles a glimmer of triumph in her eyes that betrays her even more than the surreptitious smile that stretches across her face with ever-increasing glee.

_What will you do when I'm gone, mother?_

**Entry 23:  
****The Mirror of Blanche Schadenfreude Part I: What the Witch did Seek to See**

* * *

"What will you do when I'm gone, mother?"

The novelty of gloating over my mortality disappears from my mother's face as quickly as my words reach her ears, leaving only a dull, stricken grimace on her mouth. It is only now sinking in: I am going to die. She only now realises it: from then on, she will be _alone_. For a moment I feel empathy. I too was in that place. You came to see me and I saw the end. From then on I would be alone. In the same breath you asked to try and know me, you tore them out of my hands. Hatori... Shigure... Yuki... my most precious people and I saw us all fall: them into your hands, me between your fingers. My mother flicks her long, slick locks out of her face and stares at me with the blankness of a vanquished queen. I slowly get to my feet. We are more alike than I've ever wanted us to be... Both of us destined to be abandoned by friend and foe alike. In the silence of my room, the question speaks for itself.

**Entry 24:  
****The Mirror of Blanche Schadenfreude: Part II - What the Witch did Behold**

* * *

I lean my head against cool bamboo taking relief from the chill feeling of the surface next to my skin. Outside the wind continues to howl. My eyes flicker, erratically following the falling leaves. My outer kimono trails half-discarded from my shoulders to the floor. In the courtyard below, the thud, thud, thud of students practising is a constant reminder of life beyond these walls. I hear the staccato slide of the shoji screen announce my mother's departure. If only you would leave my thoughts as easily... but the nature of a rose is to have thorns. A bitter smile tugs at my lips as my fingers curl_splinter _into the shoji screen's frame.

**Entry 25:  
****Et tu**

* * *

I loved them with everything I knew how to give but they didn't love me - I don't think they ever have. I don't think they ever would have, in any case. Perhaps I knew it even then. So now I wonder: what, under those circumstances, was I supposed to do? What was it I was expected to do?

Back then, what would have been the 'right' thing to have done? We're not the same, never were, never will be. That's the reason you won, and I lost them in the end. You were a person to whom others gravitated; I am a person whom others watched from afar, held aloof and in fear and I still have no answers as to what I should have done 'right'.

In the greater scheme of things, it has become irrelevant. Leaving myself exposed to betrayal like that is a mistake I will never repeat. Loving someone the way I once did and believing in that kind of love is something I'll never do again, not only because I have discarded the sentimental naivety of my youth, but because doing so requires a kind of trust and belief that I am, happily, no longer capable of.

**Entry 26:  
****Acres of the portrait of the child who grew up to be the person you grew up not to be**

_Corbenic/Deeds of Strife & Belligerence_

_The search for the Holy Grail did lead Lancelot and Percival hence to Corbenic Castle - which is and was never twice the same. _

Parasols bloom in the streets outside as droplets of rain descend in a fine drizzle from the now pewter sky. Fever and humidity cause my clothes to cling clammily to my frame and I almost regret changing out of the kimono into deep-plum-black, high necked polo neck and cotton pants, but I've never liked riding motorbikes or cars in kimono.

My reflection ghosts briefly in the mirror as I lean forward to tie my boot laces - the usual gaunt cheeks, sunken eyes, horizon-wide mouth and fever-bright eyes. My skin is an unhealthy, pallid grey, and strands of silver glisten like gossamer in my plum bangs. As I raise my head, a rainbow and damp and dancing parasols glide past beyond the window frame. My blind fingers finish knotting the lace cord. Folded over the back of the chair near me, a snow-white raincoat rests. I pick it up and slide my arms into its arms. I am the only person I know who has to wear two of everything whether in kimono or _yofuku_. I pick up the weighty denim pea coat that was beneath the raincoat; fold it over my arm just in case. I stop as my reflection meets my eyes in the mirror by the door. My fingers caress the glass and splay against its surface. Fever blurs the images. An ache ripples from my arm straight through to my heart.

**Entry 27:  
****Parasol Paradise**

* * *

I was foolish enough, after the curse was broken, to trust the consoling advances of certain clan members. For a year, I was the ignorant puppet of ambitious clan members, believing their bold-faced lies. By the time I broke free, control of the financial affairs of the clan had slipped from my grasp into their clutches. Since I woke up from my false paradise, it has been my lot to wage a one-sided battle to regain what I gave away, whilst amongst the conspirators, Enzan Souma looks at me with a sliver of derision in his patronising indulgence as he intercepts my departure and demands an audience, seeing in me still some semblance of the naive Pinocchio I was when I was held in his thrall. For my part, the thought fills me with unspeakable abhorrence.

So I trace the rim of a cup of rose tea, sweetened almost to syrup by copious amounts of sugar, while I try not to hiss at him as we converse through gritted teeth. I am afraid - I was once weak to this man, I am hate-filled - I was once weak to this man. I unclench my teeth enough to take another sip of tea. The cloying sweet taste swallowed, I am able to speak without spitting vitriol with every syllable, and dripping venom with every word. What has passed between us has bred an enmity between us that runs deep. More so, because the glistening fields of naivety glimmer in my memory as a brief and fleeting glimpse of bliss. Paradise was lost once more by knowledge awakened. And more memories flicker loose behind my eyes.

**Entry 28:  
****The Garden of Eve**

* * *

A stillness has settled in the art room, tainted with the lingering tension of a recent fight, the air heavy with thoughts: Izumasa and I. Izu sits, his body carelessly slouched in an armchair, his eyes staring blankly out the window at a view he is not seeing. His mouth is down turned in a grimace of morose disenchantment, and I sit perched on the edge of the desk, staring up at a blank white ceiling, hoping to blank the past few minutes into the featureless expanse above me -

_"Don't you ever get tired, Akito? Don't you ever get tired of dying? That body of yours dissolving from the inside out, you can barely manage to clutch together the scraps of life still squirming around like maggots inside of you and somehow you still persist in existing. Must we be forced to see you, desecrating our eyes? Clinging disgustingly to life.... "Izu's voice is suddenly a chilling sound in my ear. "Die already." I am still before I turn abruptly, to find myself staring into his face - so close I can count the lime specks in his emerald eyes..._

**Entry 29:  
**_**Extracts of Hymns Written in My Mother Tongue: **_**Stillness **

* * *

- Proverbial demons with angels' faces, we are too alike, using what we know of ourselves to attack each other. Too cruel, too self-centred, too wanting to hurt, to not dig beneath that angelic veneer and claw out the beasts that lie within the other's heart. We expose our own hearts at the same time, though, and there is one truth that pierces through it all - when we fight, we expose an ugliness in each other that is only surpassed by the ugliness in ourselves. Our true faces shine through for a few truthful moments before shields, masks and disguises are flung firmly back on -

_My gaze drifts to a blank spot on the wall. Without looking back, I topple the glass of water onto my desk and onto the painting of our family that lies on the desk. I do not have to look at it to know the colours are already starting to bleed. I reach for his shirt and pull myself upward and forward, leaning closer to him, and bringing my mouth to his ear... _

- and in the aftermath, we are left drained and disillusioned with ourselves, having to pick up the pieces once more, and try to make an angel of the devil within... or at least maintain the illusion of one -

**Entry 30:  
**_**Extracts of Hymns Written in My Mother Tongue: **_**Noh**

* * *

_"This family... is like a painting," I say quietly into his ear. "The clan is the paper, its members are the individual brushstrokes, and the family is the painting." As I lean forward, I know he can see the painting over my shoulder. That is what I want. "Like in this painting..." I pull back, allowing him to see my eyes, and me his. "The image that was there before has been destroyed, but even after the individual elements are gone, and the painting is ruined, the paper, though damaged, remains and..." I trail a finger through the swirling mess behind, and raise it between us, "... the ink remains. " I pause for a breath. "I am the ink, Izumasa, and I will cling to life, disgustingly, as you put it, because I, with each breath I draw from the scraps of life you mock me with, colour the clan in hues indelible and incomparable, and in my persistence, I spread myself as thick and as far as possible across it, seeping into its very substance. And when I'm gone, your desecrated eyes will still remember me... won't they? And why?" I grace him with one of my fox's smiles and slowly release him, pushing him lightly away with an indolent gaze. "Because I will have etched myself even into every speck in your eyes, Izumasa." His eyes fixate on the ruined portrait and a disturbed frown wrinkles onto his forehead. _

The light flooding the room from the window out of which Izu is pretend daydreaming again, is suddenly too bright and too harsh for me. My desk is wet, water dripping onto the ground off the corner of a now-ruined painting. I look down at the growing puddle. There are particles of ink swimming in the water... waiting for it to dry. Izu looks up at me as I stand.

"I will inform the maids to bring you tea when they come to clear this away," I say motioning to the messy desk. He nods, accepting the terms of the armistice, and turns back to staring into his thoughts. Without another word, I walk out.

**Entry 31:  
**_**Extracts of Hymns Written in My Mother Tongue: **_**Ink **

* * *

Izumasa is over a year dead now; his sister, Kazue, the only echo of his existence left. They were the last of the modern generation of Souma - my generation. He tumbled recklessly to his demise in a pyrotechnics show of life, despair and everything in between - a firefly life lived as daringly as it could be before things all fall apart. I survived him, as I continue to survive everything but our story exemplifies the disillusion and disenchantment that my generation has suffered into our grown ages when we realise that nothing will fill the gaping holes in our souls. In the end, those who stay behind too long tend to crash and burn.

"I hope I didn't keep you waiting." My voice crosses the emptiness between us.

Her long, sleek oil-black hair drips over the piano as her dextrous fingers tinkle forth _Fur Eliz_ from the piano keys, her face a mask of bland indifference. They call her Shirahime, the snow princess, as cold as ice, the genius of our generation whose musical talent has made her an object of bitter envy and unease amongst musicians with more than three times her experience. Her refined face, like a stoic Audrey Hepburn, has the public enamoured of the flicker of a smile that ghosts across her lips during performances before returning to the graveyard of her joy.

"It's fine." She finally says. She says nothing more.

Austria is a long way from here and soon she'll be gone, pursuing further studies there at a music academy. It is, perhaps, the best thing for her.

**Entry 32:  
****A Wind Called Amnesia**

* * *

My transition to clan head has not been without its pitfalls. My year in a fool's paradise cost the clan dearly - the rise of the Enzan Soumas of our clan to prominence in the Main House caused a split with the traditional power stronghold of the elders. I have managed to reclaim the Main House, but the clan still has not been reunited. Instead, I straddle the rift between the two power centres - a compromise and concession of both sides, one of the few fragile stitches left holding this clan together. There have been gains and losses along the way. Battles still remain to be fought. Weak as I am, I can afford no leeway. In the mission for clan unity, I cannot afford to be anything but absolute. In my love. In my hate. In my indifference.

The drive with Kazue is uneventful. Her fingers continuously tap at the steering wheel, and a glance at her tells me her mind is somewhere far from here. Without Izumasa here dropping the snide comments which gave away his astute ability to glean gossip of the happenings at the main house even during the briefest of stays, the air between is us is dry and void. I turn my gaze to through the window, and focus on the streets that pass by rather than the silence of the absent. My second compound looms.

**Entry 33:  
****Xanadu**

* * *

My grandmother's sister is as austere as her preferred school of ikebana. Grey hair cut in a razor sharp, asymmetrical style, she peers with hawk-like shrewdness at the world with watery grey eyes, in her iron-coloured kimono. Her mouth is a small knot of judgement as she sucks on her inner cheek. Abrupt, impatient, indominatable: she and the elders have formed the strongest part of my power base. They are not easily swayed: tradition and clan history makes them stiff-backed walls against change in Souma clan. As she wraps her claw-like hand around some potting dirt, she seems to hold the soil of our family tree in her grasp, threatening any who dare to change the fundamental with a handful in the face. This iron opinion and iron will has saved me more than once. More than any, the older generation of Souma are the reason for my continuing reign.

In return I shield them from change; like I once was, from people like you, who would tear apart their worlds and make them anew. I keep them in a rarefied nostalgia, where they can live out the rest of their lives with relative peace of mind. Like wisteria wistfully waving in the wind; their lives drift by serenely in their golden years, content in visions of a Souma that they can still recognise.

**Entry 34:  
****Ikebana**

* * *

In my grand-aunt's greenhouse, time is stifled and the seconds tick by to the sound of steaming tea. The rice-paper screens filter out the dull grey outside, and we are cocooned here from the world. Her grey wrinkled hand lifts the delicate china cup to her lips and everything follows the staccato pace of distant yesterdays. It feels like years have pass before I leave, but it's not even an hour.

When I leave, we walk the other way out of the compound, through the ancient gardens. She walks beside me, her dry, rice paper voice filling the air with trivial civilities and observations, which require demure or no replies from me. Lotus blooms fill the air with fragrance and we drift through the gardens - the gardens I once walked with my father, green beneath a dreary sky.

Things hurt here in ways I never expected them to. I can see myself reflected in the still water. Shigure's claim that I take after my mother is revealed to be but wistful wish when gazed upon in the still water - cold eyes stare back out at me from my father's face. The rain puddles ripple as I step into them, concentric circles spreading further outwards. It starts to rain again. We say our goodbyes on a bridge, my grand-aunt and I, stiff slight bows towards each other, and I walk towards Kazue's waiting car.

**Entry 35 :  
****Shisui**

* * *

The streets are deserted beneath pewter sky turned storm blue. The drizzle has stopped and left in its wake a bone-aching chill. I am glad to be changing out of the deep-plum-black, high necked polo neck and cotton pants into kimono, already imagining myself wrapped in the warm, padded layers.

My reflection ghosts briefly in the mirror as I lean forward to untie my boot laces - the usual gaunt cheeks, sunken eyes, horizon-wide smile and fever-bright eyes. My skin is an unhealthy, pallid grey, and strands of silver that glisten like gossamer amidst plum bangs. A dark blue sky and chill and rain-splattered window dance past me as I raise my head. My blind fingers finish unknotting the laces. I slide my arms out of the snow white raincoat, and folded it over the back of the chair. The black pea coat I was wearing beneath it is quickly shed, on tossed over the same chair's arm. I am the only person I know who has to wear two of everything whether in kimono or _yofuku_. I pause for a moment as a reflection off glass catches my eye. My hand reaches out to the photograph of my father and I, taken so long ago. My fingers caress the glass, tracing the two faces which echo each other and mine captured in immortal memory beneath a snow-white umbrella, before splaying against the cool surface. Fever blurs the images. Despite everything, I've barely grown older than that child.

**Entry 36:  
****Parasol Parade**

* * *

"Hey, is that Uncle Kureno?" A hand thrusts a photograph in front of my face, one of its fingers tapping a face in the group captured on the glossy card. Its owner is helping me go through boxes of history, sitting cross-legged under the kokatsu; she goes through each of the boxes I haul from under it.

Sora Souma is one of those outcast children who doesn't seem to fit in where she should belong, and seems to fit in here, where she doesn't quite belong. As volatile as the sky, her storm-grey eyes drink in the world thirstily, her hunger offering me glimpses into a life I will never know. She dreams of freedom, and I do not even understand what it is. I never have.

I nod in response to her question. "That should have been just before he left school." I pause as I find a scrapbook I made long ago. A badly drawn zodiac circle disfigures the front with all the names of my zodiac written by the signs, my name scrawled above it, and Kyou's begrudgingly below. I put it to the side where it lands on the centre of a pile of photos, displacing a number of them and sending them sliding to the floor - a photograph of Yuki and Ayame in Venice. Hatori and Shigure some place in town. Haru and Rin and Momiji in Germany. Kisa and Hiro in Hokkaido. Kureno and his new wife in some rural place. This is the family portrait you left me with: disparate pieces of people who hate me - seeking to be anywhere but near me. Peeking out beneath the scrapbook is the photograph Sora was holding earlier - it's of all of them together: they're at your place... you in the centre and everyone around, and me nowhere to be found. I move the book to the ground and pick up the fallen portraits.

**Entry 37:  
****The Scrapbook of Akito Souma**

* * *

The clan is flaking apart in the wake of the loss of the ties that did bind us. I am not forgiven by the zodiac and my touch only turns us to ash and through all of this, the clan is flaking apart in the wake of the loss of its identity: god and zodiac disbanded, we don't know what is left to hold on to. I reach for the boxes on the tallest shelves and bring them down, and replace them with the ones we've already organised.

Sora scrambles to open them, eager to rifle their contents for new treasures. Souma has been built on tradition; however, the traditions of Souma leave little room for the next generation. Now more than ever, new ideas and new ways of being need to be introduced if the new generation is to feel they are more than just pillars for our traditions. The boxes now swapped out, I sit next to Sora and start helping her sort through what is more than just a history of me. The clan must change and god and the zodiac are just another tradition that has to be discarded. I know this in the few seconds I am able to catch a glimpse of the world through Sora eyes. I am not god to her... and she is happier.

**Entry 38:  
****Paris|Babylon**

* * *

"This one looks funny," Sora says, screwing up her face at one of the photographs she has bunched in her hands. _Flick_. She swaps another to the top. We're on the last box. The others packed away. "Ah! Old Man looks slee-eepy!" she laughs, using the nickname I've gotten because of the grey streaks of hair on either side of my face. _Flick_. "You're so skinny, ne!"

"Eyo! Ne!" she sighs as she leans back to survey the wall. "I didn't realise you had so many photos."

"You took most of them," I reply, arching an eyebrow.

"Yeah," she says, " but still, I didn't realise there were so many." I look over at the wall myself and have to agree with her. I seem to have accumulated boxes upon boxes of memories. Looking back at the ones spread out in front of her, it seems as if I'm in almost every picture. Breaking up fights, arguing with Izu. Lazing around with Jin. I remember the first time I saw one of her snapshots. No one had taken pictures of me for a long time except for stiff formal photographs for the clan albums. It was strange to see myself in motion, in life...

For so long I have felt like a redundant relic of a bygone era - I did not even realise I had become a fascination for the children of a new one.

_Snap! Whirr! _Sora grins impishly at me from behind the camera. I find myself smiling back.

**Entry 39:  
****Still Life, Still Smiling**

_Camelot/Peacekeeper_

_Camelot, the valiant. Camelot, the light. Camelot, the castle of knights. _

_Black. Sombre. Black. Grim. Black. Gloom. Black. Black. They stand around the open grave, waiting to scatter their feigned sorrows together with the dirt into the yawn of his grave. Youth is shrivelled up, papery skinned and ash-grey in the gloom of a funeral home. Outside, the sun gloats brightly over the open grave, a gaping mouth that awaits a feast. They are clad in black. Pin-neat. Strait-laced. Grim. Sombre. Bleak. One by one they walk past the hole where they are to bury him. A handful of dirt cast over the casket in an empty gesture. They buried him long ago, the grim creature of their youthful horror, buried him alive in their minds and forgot all about him. Ayame shivers beneath the sun-bright sky. I cling foolishly to Shigure's side, afraid the grave will swallow me up too. Hatori and Kureno stand side by side and I cannot read them. My father... dead, and no one has taught me how to grieve. My mother shrieks and lunges. I blink dry eyes._

**Entry 40:  
****Mourning After**

* * *

I blink my eyes open groggily as I awaken from my sleep. Shaking off the last fragments of my dreams, I turn to the TV which flickers with the latest episode of the anime marathon that the Souma children are hosting in my TV room. Eager faces fixated upon the flashing screen (the biggest one in the whole compound, they claim) barely notice I'm awaken. My pillow is one of my cousin-nephews shoulders. Jun only grunts slightly as I shift to make myself more comfortable. In my half-dozed state in this chair, he reminds me of Hatsuharu. Both radiate that strange comfort of a favourite toy whose origins have long been lost.

It's been a long time since I saw Haru. He is one of the Overseas Souma now, him and Rin. Rin who I never liked, who was as cuddly as Pinocchio before he became a real boy. I still see her hate-slitted eyes glaring at me...

I reach for the popcorn bowl and grab a handful to stuff in my mouth and try to wake up enough to make sense of the just-starting next-episode promo that flickers onto the screen. Sitting here with my back against Jun's, I wonder if Rin ever became a real girl or whether Haru has any fond memories of me at all. These are however just trivial thoughts that fade as quickly as they come, drowning in the shouts of the on-screen hero as he goes Super Saiyan 3.

**Entry 41:  
****Cotton Candy Mountain**

* * *

Tradition finds me in one of my least favourite places - the home of my parents' cousin. She is the woman our clan had wanted my father to marry. Her life was twisted to follow the tune they called and he just overturned it all. She married a merchant cousin, who's hardly ever around, away on business far longer than he is at home. While others brave forward to new frontiers, we watch them go, bound by duty, tradition, necessity and our own uncertainty and insecurity to remain behind, staring out at the world from the cages of our own device, keeping the walls of home from falling down.

Those brave enough to grasp towards their futures spare not a thought for those holding the safety nets, and it is an empathy amongst the weak that makes me walk this path every time. I want her to promise me that she'll be okay before I die, that she'll continue in the pursuit of happiness even after I am gone, but she is deaf to my unspoken pleas, focused instead on her own interpretations and dreams for the future. I ask myself - if my presence is redundant, why do I feel this burning need to stay? Or is it that _I want _to be needed? Promises of that magnitude are just reassuring lies, and I stare at the wet leaves in the gutter above her door way knowing the reassurance I seek to give and receive is but the aria of prayer wings for the fading echoes of my own fallen hope.

**Entry 42:  
****The Hollow Things that Fill Up Space**

* * *

Setsuko sits primly her hands folded delicately in her lap, her kimono smoothed and perfect like a doll's. Her head is bowed at just the right angle and I wonder how much training went into achieving that doll-like perfection. She raises her head and turns to me as I slide the door closed. I sit down beside her, my posture dishevelled compared to hers. There is a mirror in front of us, and I stare at the picture we make. Me and her.

"You should try and find something to do with your life. There's no point for you to just be waiting in front of others, powerless to do anything except what you're told."

Her hand trembles over the strings of a koto. "I'm not unhappy, Akito." she says, distantly.

It is these kinds of things that make me hate kind people: you can all be so selfish at times, never considering that _perhaps _the world needs fewer martyrs and more people who simply care.

"You're trying to be accommodating again," I say icily. "You're not happy, either, Setsuko," Her back tenses, and I relent with a sigh. "Just promise."

**Entry 43:  
****I Prefer My Lies in Metrocolor**

* * *

The silence breaks, the plucking of the string of the koto signalling the beginning of a folk song. I can't say things would have been better if my father had chosen differently. Looking down paths not taken does not reveal where they would have led. This is the way of our lives: there are no brighter what-ifs to our regrets. There is only the hollow knowledge of a survivor, and the streaks of grey in our hair that widen with each passing year.

**Entry 44:  
****Senescence**

* * *

I startle into consciousness to find myself hugging my knees, an earlier dizzy spell having turned into an afternoon doze. I stagger to my feet from the floor where I've been asleep, my eyes stinging from swimming in unshed tears, which I blearily blink away and with a worn hand, I slide open the shoji door to greet the golden afternoon. Breaths scatter irretrievably as my chest heaves with the strain of phlegm and sickness.

I lean my body against the doorway; the effort to sit up too much of an effort for a moment, and I rely on old cedar to support my frail frame. A leaf flutters from the autumning tree above, and falls past me to earth, there to rest and rot in the last part of its cycle of life I commiserate for the split second I have strength enough in me to do so, before it too falters in its poetic impressions and fails to stir me.

My respite is broken by the silent-footed servant who approaches me with my afternoon tray held in her hands. As I lean forward and reach for the spoon, the sun glints against the polished plates while the spoon reflects the orange sky. The earlier grey of rainstormed sky has been dispelled, and the afternoon sun casts a filtered orange hue into the room behind me. The day is dying.

**Entry 45:  
****Wake **

* * *

The shoji door slides open and Hitomi's voice drifts through, as he asks for me. I enter the room again and to save him the trip out here. He is still in the doorway, a smaller hand held in his. From his side, a child stares at me, wide eyes watching me carefully.

"Master Akito -"

_"Master Akito -" The voice is a distant blur, and I shake myself out of the sleep that had claimed me in the hospital room. _

_"What is it?" I rubbed my weary eyes, blinking to clear the sleep. The hospital's noise seems distant and I am not quite myself. _

_"It's over. Mother and daughter are doing well." The doctor's voice is a cool, pleased professional sound, one that I am not familiar with. 'Doing well' has never featured much in my previous diagnoses and right now, I am far from it._

_"So it's a girl, then?" I say tiredly. _

I snap out of my reverie when Hitomi hands the child over into my care. Standing, I murmur my farewell to Setsuko and pull the child along with me.

**Entry 46:  
****Birth day of the Infanta**

* * *

_"Yes, they... they'd like you to name her." Hatori is suddenly there, standing by my side, staring unreadably through me as he delivers this strange request. _

_I look at Hatori, unsure if I heard him right. "They'd what?" My voice, I notice rather unhappily, is a little hoarse, and there is a warning tingle at the back of my throat that promises to become a sore throat in an hour or two. _

_"They'd like you to choose her name." Hatori's voice is neutral - so cold and indifferent... _

_I think for a moment, staring blankly ahead of me, and then look up at him. "Megumi... is that an acceptable name?" _

_He nods, and turns, walking away to inform the happy parents I presume. As I watch his back retreat, I wonder if he noticed that 'Megumi' is one of the names on the roster on the wall in front of me. I sigh and lean back into the chair, tilting my head to stare at the ceiling. Megumi Souma is born and named on the stormy night of my twenty-second birthday. I don't see her until two weeks later, when I'm considered fully recovered from the cold I caught in the waiting room. When I do, we are nothing alike - she reminds me of you, and I want to hurl something at someone. _

**Entry 47:  
****The Sound of My Name is Forgotten in My Country**

* * *

Megumi and I walk hand in hand through the compound. She kicks up leaves as she marches through, taking joy in the simple act. We head out past the other clan members preparing for the night's party. The clear skies a good sign for the celebrations being planned for later. As we walk, people pause to acknowledge us in greeting, enamoured of the idea of birthday twins walking together. This more than anything is my mark on Megumi, my claim to the child who makes her strides into near-leaps just to match her steps into my naturally larger stride as we go to visit my father's grave.

The melancholy of a firefly is neither in its flicker of a life nor in its sputter of a death. The melancholy of a firefly is in the memory of its glow. A firefly's legend is only remembered because it will die. In the memory of its existence, it is the metaphor of our existence carried in the lingering poignancy of that transience held in a glowing light that is its dying light. Ink remains even after the painting is gone. A firefly's memory haunts even after its light has died, and I will be more than the tragedy of you that was dealt to me, when I die. When I die... if not god, at least, I will be immortal, my existence etched into the memory of this clan even if it is in the form of a girl who reminds me too much of you.

**Entry 48:  
****I have Hope of a Reflection in the Eyes of the People I met on the Journey between a Firefly Life and a Tortoise Death**

* * *

My father's grave is a quiet place, lonely even. The permeation of his influence in the clan when he was alive seemed to me greater even than that of god and zodiac and I cannot believe that in death he faded into such obscurity here beneath the magnolia trees. Ren and I are the only ones who seem to bother to visit. I pity him that: the only ones who seem to remember him are a wife and child who to this day, loathe each other so much that we will never set foot before him at the same time. The stone memorial inscribed with his name is all that is left of the tributes turned platitudes that the clan have paid to him.

Before he died, my father always used to tell me how loved I would be. I really believed his words when he said I would be forever loved by the zodiac. I wonder now if he knew he was lying or if he had merely over-estimated my value or if perhaps, it was something he needed us both to believe in the face of our impending separation.

I, for my part, was desperate enough to believe in the lie that was the zodiac bond then because I didn't know what I'd do otherwise. However, the only thing in those empty emotions that everyone offered me, those offerings that I wanted so hard to believe in, was obligation. It was as empty as the box containing my father's soul. To my family I was nothing but a duty, a burden and an obligation. The love my father promised me never materialised.

**Entry 49:  
****El-Iskandriyah**

* * *

Megumi's fingers toy with the charm bracelet on my arm. It is one of her favourite games to guess each charm, just by fingering its surface. She has adored it ever since I explained the story behind the sterling silver chain, and the charms tied to it. Perhaps you'd like to know, though you've probably already figured it out. As I look at it now, I wonder if I should have a copy made and gift it to you. I'm not sure what it would mean to you, though. You'd probably take it as a bond and treasure it as a sign of friendship or something. For me, it is a reminder...

_"This bracelet represents all the twelve animals of the zodiac," I said, holding my wrist down so she could see. "It also includes the cat and god. See, this is the mouse," I turned the bracelet as I showed her each charm, naming them as we went along. "... and this is the cat." I said, showing her the last charm that hung from the clasp. _

_"Oh! I see!" she exclaimed. There was a quiet pause as she took it all in, then... "Mm… Akito?" "Yes?" ...."Where is god?" _

_"Oh, that," I smiled, my eyes becoming lost in the distant memory of that which no longer was. "god is the chain that goes through and links them all together." Her hand in mine as we walked back to the main house was the only warmth in a world I found suddenly cold. _

_**'god was broken, Megumi, and all the charms that were linked to him slipped off and fell away, forever lost him.'**_

**Entry 50:  
****Fairytale Endings**

* * *

Tomorrow is something I've had to build for myself from the ashes of my failure with nothing and no one to guide me save my own bitter experiences. Your success destroyed my world but I survived. Barely, but I did. Now I am picking up the frayed edges of a torn existence and calmly and patiently sewing the threads back in. The tapestry I have continued to weave with such delicate care is something that I hope will outlast even the one of the thirteen who have left me. In time, it is one that will even allow me to forget you.

The lanterns along the houses are being lit and raised, and music is beginning to play. Children's shrieks echo into the night air, and the sun is now just an orange glow on the horizon. I can see my family, a swirling crowd of excitement inside the hall. Megumi's small hand tugs at mine, and I follow her eager gaze as she stares at the first of the firecrackers going off. I am leaving thoughts of you here, where all memories belong, to fade beneath the barren magnolia. I wonder if you think of me at all, and if so, what. But that isn't really important anymore in the wake of who I have become. I don't think you'd know me even if you hadn't known me before.

**Entry 51:  
****Hanabi**

* * *

I have taken the empty never-ending banquet that fell from barren hearts, the one I lost, the one you stole, the one to which no one came, the one they choose not to remember, the one which in the end was never mine anyway, and now leave it with you. I failed to hold them to me and all I have are my burnt ash memories of them. I would hate you for that, except you probably don't know and so can't even care.

You are the summer blaze that came and burnt away the tinder that was everything I had, but from the ashes you left in your wake; I have made new growth thrive. I am rebuilding Camelot, one glimmer of happiness at a time, and so as I lay my flowers on my father's grave, I can set all that aside for now, and tonight, on the eve of my twenty-ninth birthday, as I turn away from my father's grave, I think, right now, if I were to try hard enough, I just might be able to thank you.

**Entry 52:  
****Vespiritine**

It is only the end of the beginning

'The Once and Future King'

--------------------------------------------------------------

Author Notes:

This is the story I originally wanted to write when I started writing for Fruits Basket. More than one year on, it is done. If someone had told me when I first started writing this, that I would have as much trouble with it as I did, I would have laughed at them. I believed I knew the male Akito enough to be able to do this without even having to try. However, after I finished Emotional Vodka, I started on completing this and discovered that working on it had become a million times more difficult. In the previous chapters of Spiral Juliet I had tried to write the female Akito with all the bitterness and venom of the pre-revelation Akito... and I had succeeded in writing a female Akito that I liked. The line between male and female blurred, and the whole time I have been writing this, the Akito in my mind has lost the strong sense male or female, and instead become a strong sense of pre- and post revelation Akito. It really has taken me this long to complete: a week after I posted Emotional Vodka to now. The last paragraph I wrote for this installation is the first paragraph of 'The People I met' and it was written beginning to end on 23 December 2008.

This is an ode to Akito as a character. Whichever Akito you read it as, male or female, if you go back and read it again as the other gender there should be little difference. If you can do that then I have written the story I wanted to write. This for me is my motivating form of Akito. Just Akito. Selfish, manipulative, egotistical, hurt, vulnerable, fierce and determined, but male or female, still Akito.

The story is set all in one day, in a world where pre-revelation Akito has had to move on after Tohru has succeeded in breaking the curse and the zodiac have left. I used elements from the anime, manga and my own ideas. With the zodiac gone, Akito is still clan head, and there are still other Souma around.

The title Fata Morgana comes from the Italian for Morgana Le Fay who was the half-sister and bitter enemy of King Arthur in life, but at the same time she was his sanctuary in death, taking his body to rest on her island until the day he would return to rule again. It is also used as a name for mirage castles. The female Akito for me is like a Morgana Le Fay, someone with power and control who is an enemy in the past, but a friend in future. It is also about the disguise of a male Akito who is actually female.

The Once and Future King is a title of King Arthur who is said to have been taken to Avalon, where he lies until the day he will return to rule once more. The Akito in my story has been defeated but has worked hard, enough that s/he can become a king again one day. There is also the feeling of the male Akito in this title. King Arthur is thought of as a hero, but he made a lot of big mistakes. In the end, he was killed in battle by his son, Mordred, whom he fathered with his half-sister. One story goes that when Mordred was a baby, Arthur learned of the prophecy that he would be killed by Mordred and he ordered all babies under a certain age to be killed because he did not know where Mordred was only how old he should have been. It is said that in doing this, Arthur brought disfavour on himself that would eventually lead to his death at Mordred's hand. So Akito as King Arthur brings the story of someone who tried to hold on to hard to their power and instead destroyed it, and yet who has a chance of redeeming themselves in future.

Avalon, Lyonesse, Corbenic and Camelot are the names of places from the legends of King Arthur.

Clues on some of the musing headings can be found by searching them on the internet, others were completely made up by me for musing. If you don't have any luck, you can pm me. It is just too long for me to go through all of them here. As a last note, this was probably a difficult read, as I sometimes wrote things in a strange way to keep to the idea that these are the thoughts of a complicated, intelligent and slightly unstable character. If there is anything you want to know more about feel free to ask. That's the joy of FF. The author is only an email away.

And so I give you 52 musings from Akito's perspective: your gift for New Year 2009. Enjoy. Comments and Criticisms welcome.


	6. Like the Night of Cloudless Climes

Disclaimer: Fruits Basket is not and has never been the property of R S Slagondrayer who has not and has never claimed any right to its copyright. All characters are copyright to their respective creators.

Synopsis: "And all that's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes."

Warnings: possibility out of characterness (OOC) and confusion, one-shot, villain-centricity and possible sympathy for a non-sympathetic character, writer inexperience, **spoilers**, possible British spelling, deliberate abuse of grammar, possibility of disappointed expectations etc. **Sweetness.  
**

Read Responsibly.

**Like the Night of Cloudless Climes and Starry Skies  
**

By

R S Slagondrayer

The summer is a hummingbird: moments moving so fast in the heat they're a buzzing blur. The alternatingly stickily humid and rain-soaked days are now some of Akito's favourite times of year. School is out and she can spend time with her favourite people.

Today, they're going on a picnic. She's preparing some of the food their taking along. Hiroaki is lurking like a gull, waiting for leftovers as she prepares the picnic lunch. Her only son and second and last child, he's the spitting image of her: her face, her hair, her nose, her smile - everything except his eyes, which are the same colour as his father's.

He even has her temperament, as he falls into a sulk having failed to gain a snack out of his lingering. She silently hands him an onigiri.

Akito isn't really a good cook, but Hiroaki will eat anything she makes. She used to think he'd eat anything full stop, until he was old enough to take to restaurants and he turned out to be the pickiest eater she'd ever met, even pickier than her! Shigure says it's because he's been "raised on bad food" and become spoilt. She suspects however he must have gotten her taste as well. The onigiri she hands him disappears into his mouth in one bite despite the liberal bits of chili visible in it. Shigure and Maemi's eyes water just from seeing it in their bento box.

It's unhygienic to let him sit on the kitchen counter while she prepares food, not to mention childish on his part, but as he tells her about school: he's class president and school delinquent at the same time (she blames Shigure for the latter, _he _says that he's just like her), she doesn't push him off like she should. Several onigiri disappear from the counter into his pockets. Who or what he feeds with them she shudders to imagine.

"The food Aki makes is weird but cool," he says, licking his fingers. "I like the flavours. It's one-of-a-kind style." He grins at her and reaches for another. She lets him take another, and takes one herself, before casually putting the dish out of his reach. If she lets him he'll eat everything.

His language, his mannerisms are just so unlike either her or Shigure or even any of his friends. He's his own kind of person, and she doesn't know what to make of it. He's so radically different from anything she's encountered to the point where she feels like he was raised on an alien planet and then smuggled into her heart. Her Hiroaki, whose name they all shorten to Aki, and who has shortened her name to Aki since he was four years old because 'that means we are the same'.

The door opens and Maemi comes in. Maemi is bright sunshine beaming into the house. Unlike her mother, Maemi can cook and she handles most of the family meals, although Aki doesn't eat half of it because it's not up to some mystical standard anyone's yet to identify. At sixteen, she's cute, worries that she's a bit too fat (she's a bit plump but nothing worthy of the attention she gives it). She's snuck a read of some of her father's books when he wasn't looking and thinks he's the best thing since cellphones. She's Shigure's daughter through and through. Mischievous eyes, an elegant face, and a sense of humor that drives people up the wall.

As she comes in, she wrinkles her nose a little at the spread her mother is preparing, and pushes her brother off the counter.

"Hey!" Hiroaki protests, dusting himself off.

"Akito, you shouldn't let this idiot sit on the counter," she scolds, throwing her bag down on one of the couches. Her kids are slobs. Akito is hardly one to talk, but then she was waited on hand and foot for most of her teen years. They've no such excuse.

"How was practice?" she asks.

Maemi groans. She attends a music academy, and there is a concert coming up. A groan means practice didn't go well, so Akito goes to the fridge and reaches in for a milk drink. These are Maemi's favourite, and her face lights up when she sees the box. She'd thought they'd run out.

"I went shopping," Akito explains with a shrug. Shopping is one of the things she's gotten better at, since marrying Shigure. Maemi takes the drink gratefully and sips through the straw.

There was a time Akito wasn't really sure she was a good mother. Maemi was her first born, and she worried she was doing everything wrong, was going about everything wrong, and she'd keep Shigure up at night telling him all her worries, and when she was expecting Hiroaki, that fear reached its height. Maemi was four and she overheard Akito on one of those nights. She'd rushed through the door and flung her arms around her mother, and just hugged her for a long while and then said, face still buried in her shoulder. "You're the mother I want."

Every year on the anniversary of that day she asks her children if she's still the mother they want. Every year since that day, it's been yes. Maemi gave that to her, and they have been the mother and daughter with that special understanding ever since.

The three of them sit, waiting for Shigure to come home in order for the four of them to go picnicking.

It's their last summer here. Last night, Akito finally agreed it was time to return to the family estate. She's really enjoyed raising them and having them to herself, but at the end of the day, they are Soumas and she is the clan head. It is time they got to learn more about their family, and so they are all going back.

As Shigure takes the over-sized picnic hamper, comically exaggerating its weight, and jokingly asking who's body is going to be sleeping with fishes, Akito can say she's been happy these past years and that, yes, for them too, it's time to go home.

The family makes its way down to the beach front, Akito's eyes sparkling like the ocean in front of them, her not-so-youthful beauty radiant with happiness. She can say yes, it's been a charmed life after all.

It Ends

'She Walks in Beauty'

* * *

A/N:

I had wanted to write a happy story for some time, and this turned out to be the happiest Akito story I could write. I like this for the quiet happy ending I thought I would never write, and that is why I decided to finally post this. I'd say it's less heavy, literary than my previous chapters, but it is the happiest one of all that I ever wrote on Akito, and even of all my ideas and works. For that I will forgive it almost anything.

The lines of the titles, and the synopsis are from the poem _'She walks in beauty'_ by Lord Byron. It has been a while since I first wrote this, but I believe I chose it because it said best what I felt I wanted people to see when they looked at this side of Akito. This Akito is related to all my previous Akito's but she is most related to the Akito in "Now is the Winter' and 'Emotional Vodka'. She is Akito settled and at peace, Akito who has lived and loved, Akito who is living and loving, and Akito who is going to continue to live and love. She is the Akito who has rebuilt her Camelot, who has understood her Autumn God, who has chosen the uncertainty of her own real-life emotions, over the certainty of acting out Romeo and Juliet. She is not Akito who has made different choices, but the Akito who has made and taken each of the choices before, and continued forward through those choices.

You don't always have to turn around to walk a different path, sometimes you keep moving forward, and keep changing direction for the better and you'll still end up in the place you would have been if you'd taken the other way. Sometimes, even the difficult path can be one that we'll find that we walk in beauty.

To all my reviewers, and readers, thank you. And I hope you have enjoyed it.

R S Slagondrayer


End file.
